For home workstations, HanseMerkur relies on FRITZ! - HanseMerkur

HanseMerkur is a medium-sized, independent insurance group. They specialize in personal insurance, with their main focus on health and travel insurance. Their product range is rounded off by risk and pension products, as well as property and accident insurance.

More than 2,200 employees and independent agency owners from their office and field staff generated a revenue of approximately 3.3 billion euros in the 2021 financial year. They have more than 10 million customers. Around 800 employees work remotely, meaning they have a dedicated remote workspace, or have submitted an application for this working model. In addition, there are around 20 special locations. To connect these work stations to the company headquarters, HanseMerkur relies on FRITZ!Box models from FRITZ! and the AX69 solution (connection to an Auto Configuration Server) from Axiros.

For the connection, HanseMerkur had a dedicated internet line installed at the employees' homes, which is isolated from the families' privately used internet connection. The company’s IT department relies on a single-provider strategy and supplies its agents or staff working from home with (V)DSL connections from Deutsche Telekom. Normally the FRITZ!Box 7590 is used at these locations. Some employees can already use fiber optic connections and were therefore supplied with the FRITZ!Box 5530 Fiber. In regional sales offices and in other special cases, HanseMerkur also relies on the FRITZ!Box 6890 LTE in order to combine the DSL connection with an LTE failover option for greater failover protection.

For security reasons, the computers the employees use for working at home are connected exclusively via network cable. They then work in a virtualisation environment from Citrix. Wi-Fi is turned off on the FRITZ!Box. So far, HanseMerkur has also not been using the telephony functions offered by the FRITZ! routers: Employees can currently be reached by phone via hardware-based IP phones (‘hardphones’), which connect to the SIP server at the company headquarters via the internet connection at the home workstation.

As of mid-2022, approximately 200 FRITZ!Box devices were already in use at HanseMerkur. The plan is to double this number in the foreseeable future. In order to centrally manage all of these devices and keep their configurations in line with the specifications of the IT department, the company relies on an Auto Configuration Server (ACS). They decided to use the professional remote maintenance solution AX69 from Axiros.

‘With the FRITZ!Box from FRITZ! and the ACS from Axiros, we can achieve true zero-touch deployment,’ reports Kevin Schröder, IT specialist at HanseMerkur. The IT solutions partner delivers the respective FRITZ!Box preconfigured to the employees. Since the internet connections used at the company headquarters are known, the router is configured automatically by the ACS system once it is connected.

‘When we discussed within the IT department whether to use the FRITZ!Box to connect the home workstations, we immediately came to an agreement,’ says Kevin Schröder. ‘After all, these devices are known for their durability and reliability and are easy to administrate. The fact that this can also be combined with remote management made the decision an easy one.’

‘We haven’t regretted the decision for a single second,’ confirms Schröder’s colleague Kim Koczulla, also an IT specialist at HanseMerkur. ‘Whenever necessary, the FRITZ! support team helps us in no time at all.’ For example, while testing the solution, we found an incompatibility between the IP phones being used and the FRITZ!Box operating system FRITZ!OS. ‘Within just a week and a half, FRITZ! provided us with a patch for this.’ The IT specialists at HanseMerkur first test new FRITZ!OS updates at a test workstation at the company headquarters. If the new software is approved after testing, it is first rolled out to a small group of users and then, in the next stage, to all employees.

AX69 from Axiros also assists with this. ‘They also addressed our requirements in a targeted manner,’ says Kevin Schröder. For example, this ACS system, which Axiros only recently introduced as a new product variant, was originally designed to have only a single user role. ‘Since we needed multiple roles, Axiros quickly provided us with this feature.’ Another major advantage of the solution is that the FRITZ!Box devices used by the employees continue to operate reliably even when the ACS is temporarily unavailable, such as during maintenance periods. Deutsche Telekom’s customer service handles any issues with the connections themselves: All lines ordered through Deutsche Telekom are classified as business customer products.
‘Overall, we are more than satisfied with both the solution itself and our collaboration with FRITZ! and Axiros,’ enthuses Kim Koczulla.